PERVERSE 5G
PERVERSE 5G
Knapp
Kendall
Katchinska
Geater
Maddrell
Hullo there,
I feel like this is the Homes & Gardens edition of PERVERSE: green wallpaper, books, a sink full of drain cleaner, modernist pajama rooms and a firey kitchen. Homes & Gardens in a David Lynch film, perhaps.
I hope you enjoy these poems. There will only be two weeks of PERVERSE left after this one. Time flies when you’re having fun inside your house with cats and hand sanitiser.
With warmest wishes,
Chrissy
PERVERSE Editor
(FYI if you are reading this on a mobile phone, it may be best to turn the phone sideways. Some of the poems are displayed as images, so make sure you’ve clicked “show images” at the top of this mail. If you’d rather read these poems in a more formally typset PDF you can do so here, along with an archive of previous issues.)
Cecilia Knapp
I’m Shouting I LOVED YOUR DAD at my Brother’s Cat
I’m crying at green wallpaper
sick with the memory of your hands.
When you died, though I’d asked you not to,
I got some rest. Fair play. I ate my eggs
and the sun came out. How do you enjoy a fuck
when you’re sunburnt with grief?
I had hoped for a loss of appetite,
some silver lining. I live in a flat
that I can’t afford. It’s got big windows.
They get so dirty. I don’t condition my hair.
You’d be disappointed at how often
I let myself go.
I’ve got your name tattooed on my finger,
but it keeps falling off
when I do the washing up.
I’ve kept that cat you poured your tenderness into.
I don’t remember kissing you
but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
Some days it’s someone else’s brother.
You serve me in a coffee shop.
You’re on the mend,
pierced ears and a soft hat.
Steve Kendall
Word Power
In 1974, my Grandmother
sent me some money, with a note.
Here. Buy yourself a dictionary.
I got the Chambers. 3rd edition.
There are ten letters in drawing pin.
I found one, today, nestling
between the pages, like a bookmark.
The tenth word on p. 736
where it was, is lagrimoso.
Who can say what it all means?
Imagine. A paper clip? Lagoon.
A train ticket – Lagting.
I could have been elsewhere. Norway.
Or the beach. Not feeling like this.
Annie Katchinska
she’s grandiose:
here are some pieces of the earth. Light shining everywhere a clean
kind of dust a plastic bag containing disavowed contents of the self.
the pavement shone big morning puddles. a sink full of drain cleaner,
hairballs, ladybirds gnaw at the window, moths chew at the fabric.
Like this I watch myself go places, eat stuff, no one else suspects.
Didn’t need his praise although I wanted it, although I came to see
how despicable he was and that his praise meant very little but still
I wanted it. with what resources, then, could she learn to value
herself appropriately a peppermint hurt Would you live. with this
care, or its opposite? Small pockets of time I give myself. iron
(corrugated) mint linens I give myself, a high ponytail in the aquarium
means ‘The inner voice of realistic self-esteem and ambition’, glitter’s
tendency to just get all over the place, a history of needs unmet can’t
stop themselves a sprint (dainty) up the stairs a palace (empty)
Charlotte Geater
from Total Furnishing Unit
‡ fusion living ‡ pink machine ‡ night-home ‡ night-dreamers ‡ furnace room ‡ tent of the future with a garden ‡ cute house ‡ cabin in the future ‡ cabin in the past ‡ cave bed ‡ the letter (c) ‡ past events ‡ cave of glass ‡ chapel-kitchen ‡ dreamers’ house ‡ modernist pajama room with all the furniture ‡ jade flower ‡ room of the soul ‡ the bed (belly up) ‡ dream house ‡ bedroom with the rain ‡ secrets of the universe ‡ angel/angel of hope ‡ loophole ‡ mug cake maker ‡ stretching room of the body ‡ souvlaki maker ‡ the gauntlet room ‡ golden machine ‡ mansion with maple leaves ‡ dream-machine of the waking ‡ dream-machine of sleep ‡
Simon Maddrell
For reasons I don’t know
Contributor Notes
Cecilia Knapp
Cecilia Knapp is the current Young People’s Laureate for London. Poems have appeared in The White Review, Magma, Ambit and Bath magazines. She was shortlisted for the 2020 Outspoken poetry prize and short listed for the 2020 Rebecca Swift Women’s prize. Her debut novel is forthcoming with The Borough Press.
Note on ‘I’m Shouting I LOVED YOUR DAD at my Brother’s Cat’:
“This poem is part of a larger sequence which tries to find a language to communicate the experience of grief. Unsurprisingly, the sequence is a bit dream-like, meandering, contradictory, sometimes painful, sometimes joyful or absurd, like grief itself. This particular poem looks at the things (in this case a cat!) that people leave behind after they have gone and the complicated and myriad questions that are left too. I’m interested in questions in my poems, rather than answers. I’m interested in being able to dream or wonder in the poem which I hope this poem does.”
Steve Kendall
https://stevekendall.carrd.co/#
Steve Kendall is a research student at Newcastle University, writing a thesis about the Morden Tower and poems about the towers, bridges, ditches and walls of that city. His work has been published in magazines including Rialto, Magma and Strix.
Note on ‘Word Power’:
“This is a poem about how accidental occurrences and random objects have meaning for us, and how we will them to, even when we think they probably don’t, not really. I did indeed find a drawing pin stuck in the pages of a dictionary and this led me to speculate about how my life might have been, if only it had involved different forms of stationery.”
Annie Katchinska
Annie Katchinska was a Faber New Poet in 2010. In 2018 she won an Eric Gregory Award and her pamphlet Natto was published by If A Leaf Falls Press. Her debut collection of poems will be published later this year.
Note on ‘she’s grandiose:’:
“This poem is a remix of an old (and DRY) university essay I wrote, which I found randomly while sorting through some very messy cupboards at home. There were things that had happened to me since writing the essay that felt relevant, involving pavements and drain cleaner and ladybirds and ponytails and aquariums, so I flooded parts of the essay with them and this is what emerged.”
Charlotte Geater
https://ko-fi.com/A734C7T/shop
Charlotte Geater lives in Walthamstow. She has previously been published in The White Review and Strange Horizons. Her pamphlet, Poems for my FBI Agent, was published by Bad Betty Press in 2020.
Note on ‘from Total Furnishing Unit’:
“‘Total Furnishing Unit’ is a long poem I started after becoming fascinated by the work of radical Italian industrial designer Joe Colombo, and his visions of futuristic modular furniture in the 1960s and early 70s. Much of the text was generated using the GPT-2 neural network language model, using the language of Colombo and similar designers discussing their work as a jumping off point.”
Simon Maddrell
https://www.facebook.com/simonmaddrellpoetry
Simon Maddrell, born in the Isle of Man in 1965, lives in Brighton & Hove. Simon writes as a queer Manx man, thriving with HIV. His two pamphlets are Throatbone (UnCollected Press, July 2020) and Queerfella (The Rialto, December 2020).
Note on ‘For reasons I don’t know’:
“It’s a set of images showing what it’s like inside my head sometimes and how that can lead to a sense of panic when I don’t know what to focus on first. Also, how those thoughts can actually overlap each other, but I used spacing instead of repeating the words e.g. “whistling demands to be heard” — “to be heard I need to cry”.”